[QUOTE=Evil Captor]
Regardless of Sam or your emotional response to poor people, the inevitable result of almost any argument you make wrt economics is to harm poor people and favor rich people. Point is, for all the difference it makes, you and Sam and most free market advocates might as well hate poor people.
[/QUOTE]
Even if what you say about free market policies harming poor people is true—and i don’t believe that it is, at least not in all cases—there’s still an important distinction to be made between disliking poor people, on the one hand, and advocating policies that may disadvantage them on the other.
Particularly with respect to libertarians, i believe that this notion of being indifferent to poor people is fundamentally misguided. I went to a small conference last month, sponsored by the Liberty Fund and attended almost exclusively by libertarians. There was basically just me and one other guy holding up the social democrat banner. And every single one of these people showed a high level of sympathy for people at the bottom of the socio-economic scale, and a real interest in improving their lot.
The libertarians i’ve encountered in my life have nearly always been perfectly willing to discuss government intervention in the economy, and almost never dismiss it out of hand. And, indeed, some very important libertartian thinkers like F.A. Hayek do, in fact, acknowledge that there can be a positive role for government in alleviating distress and addressing issues of inequality. So did Adam Smith.
Even when i disagree with libertarians about the consequences of particular policies, i think that they are, for the most part, really motivated by genuine beliefs about what works best for society as a whole. If i have one problem with some libertarians, it is that they have been willing to ignore incursions into social and political freedoms by conservative governments, as long as those governments make the right noises regarding taxation and economic pollicy. But even this has changed, and of the libertarians i know (including those i’ve come into contact with on this message board) more supported the Democrats than the Republicans in the last Presidential election.
If i have one major problem with the general tone of some of these arguments over economic policy—and it emerges a little bit in posts like RickJay’s, above—it is what seems to be an assumption about the nature of government on the part of some people. Some free market advocates look at government and, whenever something is less than perfect, they decry it as typical government waste or inefficiency and use that as an argument to get rid of it altogether. For such folks, every minor or major problem of government is endemic and unfixable.
And yet some of these same people, when confronted with problems in the private sector, whether the inequalities or distortions of the free market, or corruption and criminal issues like Enron, shrug it off as an aberration, something that shouldn’t reflect on the system as a whole. We are told that, as long as these few bad eggs are removed from the basket, everything will be fine. Hell, we had some people tell us with a straight face a few years ago that incidents such as Enron and WorldCom were proof that the free market works. After all, those accounting firms like Arthur Andersen (oops, Accenture) sure did pay for their malfeasance. :rolleyes:
All i ask is that some of these people apply the same, er, optimism when it comes to government. While i acknowledge that there are certain inefficiencies and problems that are more likely to occur in government programs than in private enterprise, i firmly believe that, as a human institution amenable to input and change, government can be made better than it is, and that some of the problems involved with government departments can be removed or ameliorated without doing away with government altogether.
)